Surprising First-Half Hitters & A Look at 'Best Speed'
Rates & Barrels: A show about Baseball
The Athletic
4.7 • 875 Ratings
🗓️ 28 June 2023
⏱️ 67 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Eno and DVR discuss Alek Manoah's return to the mound in the Florida Complex League before digging into some of the most surprising hitters from the first half of 2023, and considering the value of 'Best Speed' as a better snapshot of a player's quality of contact than average exit velocity.
Rundown
0:56 Alek Manoah's Game Action Resumes in FCL
5:51 Jonah Heim and Elias Díaz
9:32 Josh Naylor: Will Supporting Cast Limit His ROS Value?
14:43 Yandy Díaz: Groundball Rate Back to 2022 Levels
20:32 Spencer Steer
29:07 Targeting "Obvious Buy-Low" Players
32:45 Luis Arraez
34:54 Bryson Stott: Further Room for Improvement?
41:20 Lane Thomas & Surprising Outfielders
45:03 Esteury Ruiz: Will He Top ROS Stolen-Base Projections?
53:46 Jake Fraley's Success in Cincinnati
55:30 Jorge Soler: Buying K% Improvements?
Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarris
Follow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRiper
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Stick around to the end of today's episode to hear the trailer for the Athletics' next narrative podcast, |
| 0:06.3 | the play callers, where Jordan Rodriguez will take you inside the dynamics of the NFL's youngest coaching family, |
| 0:12.5 | the Kyle Shanahan, Sean McVeigh coaching tree. |
| 0:15.1 | The entire series will be released on the Athletic Football Show feed on Monday, July 10th. |
| 0:35.9 | Welcome to Rates and Burles. |
| 0:37.7 | It is Wednesday, June 28th. |
| 0:40.9 | Derek Van Riper here with Enosaris on this episode. |
| 0:43.8 | We'll take a look at some of the most pleasant surprises of the first half. |
| 0:47.5 | Try to set expectations for the second half of the season for those players. |
| 0:51.7 | It's kind of funny. |
| 0:52.6 | I saw that Al Melchier actually wrote about |
| 0:54.8 | this same topic. I saw the story pop up on the athletic this morning after I put this run down |
| 0:59.6 | together yesterday. And we did not have a conversation about it. So we're just kind of thinking about |
| 1:03.6 | the same things as the midway point of the season approaches. I've got a new metric that I saw |
| 1:09.1 | in a J. Jaffe column today over at Fangraphs. We'll |
| 1:12.3 | talk about that. It's called Best Speed. We might find some hidden value using that as well. |
| 1:17.6 | But we begin today with one news item. Alec Manoa had a very rough day in the Florida Complex |
| 1:24.4 | League and the Blue Jays reactions to it are kind of what you'd expect. |
| 1:30.1 | I mean, John Schneider, I guess, was asked about it and said, I obviously saw the line score |
| 1:36.0 | and all that stuff, but I heard that things that we're talking about in terms of strike throwing |
| 1:39.9 | delivery, delivery, tempo, Vila were all positive. |
| 1:42.3 | This was from a story in the Toronto Star by Gregor Chisholm. |
... |
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